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here is something new about the jihadi terrorist violence of the past two decades. Both terrorism and jihad have existed for many years, and forms of “globalised” terror – in which highly symbolic locations or innocent civilians are targeted, with no regard for national borders – go back at least as far as the anarchist movement of the late 19th century. What is unprecedented is the way that terrorists now deliberately pursue their own deaths.

Over the past 20 years – from Khaled Kelkal, a leader of a plot to bomb Paris trains in 1995, to the Bataclan killers of 2015 – nearly every terrorist in France blew themselves up or got themselves killed by the police. Mohamed Merah, who killed a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, uttered a variant of a famous statement attributed to Osama bin Laden and routinely used by other jihadis: “We love death as you love life.” Now, the terrorist’s death is no longer just a possibility or an unfortunate consequence of his actions; it is a central part of his plan. The same fascination with death is found among the jihadis who join Islamic State. Suicide attacks are perceived as the ultimate goal of their engagement.

This systematic choice of death is a recent development. The perpetrators of terrorist attacks in France in the 1970s and 1980s, whether or not they had any connection with the Middle East, carefully planned their escapes. Muslim tradition, while it recognises the merits of the martyr who dies in combat, does not prize those who strike out in pursuit of their own deaths, because doing so interferes with God’s will. So, why, for the past 20 years, have terrorists regularly chosen to die? What does it say about contemporary Islamic radicalism? And what does it say about our societies today?

The latter question is all the more relevant as this attitude toward death is inextricably linked to the fact that contemporary jihadism, at least in the west – as well as in the Maghreb and in Turkey – is a youth movement that is not only constructed independently of parental religion and culture, but is also rooted in wider youth culture. This aspect of modern-day jihadism is fundamental.

Wherever such generational hatred occurs, it also takes the form of cultural iconoclasm. Not only are human beings destroyed, statues, places of worship and books are too. Memory is annihilated. “Wiping the slate clean,” is a goal common to Mao Zedong’s Red Guards, the Khmer Rouge and Isis fighters. As one British jihadi wrote in a recruitment guide for the organisation: “When we descend on the streets of London, Paris and Washington … not only will we spill your blood, but we will also demolish your statues, erase your history and, most painfully, convert your children who will then go on to champion our name and curse their forefathers.”

While all revolutions attract the energy and zeal of young people, most do not attempt to destroy what has gone before. The Bolshevik revolution decided to put the past into museums rather than reduce it to ruins, and the revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran has never considered blowing up Persepolis.

This self-destructive dimension has nothing to do with the politics of the Middle East. It is even counterproductive as a strategy. Though Isis proclaims its mission to restore the caliphate, its nihilism makes it impossible to reach a political solution, engage in any form of negotiation, or achieve any stable society within recognised borders.

The caliphate is a fantasy. It is the myth of an ideological entity constantly expanding its territory. Its strategic impossibility explains why those who identify with it, instead of devoting themselves to the interests of local Muslims, have chosen to enter a death pact. There is no political perspective, no bright future, not even a place to pray in peace. But while the concept of the caliphate is indeed part of the Muslim religious imagination, the same cannot be said for the pursuit of death.

Additionally, suicide terrorism is not even effective from a military standpoint. While some degree of rationality can be found in “simple” terrorism – in which a few determined individuals inflict considerable damage on a far more powerful enemy – it is entirely absent from suicide attacks. The fact that hardened militants are used only once is not rational. Terrorist attacks do not bring western societies to their knees – they only provoke a counter-reaction. And this kind of terrorism today claims more Muslim than western lives.

The systematic association with death is one of the keys to understanding today’s radicalisation: the nihilist dimension is central. What seduces and fascinates is the idea of pure revolt. Violence is not a means. It is an end in itself.

This is not the whole story: it is perfectly conceivable that other, more “rational”, forms of terrorism might soon emerge on the scene. It is also possible that this form of terrorism is merely temporary.

The reasons for the rise of Isis are without question related to the politics of the Middle East, and its demise will not change the basic elements of the situation. Isis did not invent terrorism: it draws from a pool that already exists. The genius of Isis is the way it offers young volunteers a narrative framework within which they can achieve their aspirations. So much the better for Isis if those who volunteer to die – the disturbed, the vulnerable, the rebel without a cause – have little to do with the movement, but are prepared to declare allegiance to Isis so that their suicidal acts become part of a global narrative.

This is why we need a new approach to the problem of Isis, one that seeks to understand contemporary Islamic violence alongside other forms of violence and radicalism that are very similar to it – those that feature generational revolt, self-destruction, a radical break with society, an aesthetic of violence, doomsday cults.

It is too often forgotten that suicide terrorism and organisations such as al-Qaida and Isis are new in the history of the Muslim world, and cannot be explained simply by the rise of fundamentalism. We must understand that terrorism does not arise from the radicalisation of Islam, but from the Islamisation of radicalism.

Far from exonerating Islam, the “Islamisation of radicalism” forces us to ask why and how rebellious youths have found in Islam the paradigm of their total revolt. It does not deny the fact that a fundamentalist Islam has been developing for more than 40 years.

There has been vocal criticism of this approach. One scholar claims that I have neglected the political causes of the revolt – essentially, the colonial legacy, western military interventions against peoples of the Middle East, and the social exclusion of immigrants and their children. From the other side, I have been accused of disregarding the link between terrorist violence and the religious radicalisation of Islam through Salafism, the ultra-conservative interpretation of the faith. I am fully aware of all of these dimensions; I am simply saying that they are inadequate to account for the phenomena we study, because no causal link can be found on the basis of the empirical data we have available.

My argument is that violent radicalisation is not the consequence of religious radicalisation, even if it often takes the same paths and borrows the same paradigms. Religious fundamentalism exists, of course, and it poses considerable societal problems, because it rejects values based on individual choice and personal freedom. But it does not necessarily lead to political violence.

The objection that radicals are motivated by the “suffering” experienced by Muslims who were formerly colonised, or victims of racism or any other sort of discrimination, US bombardments, drones, Orientalism, and so on, would imply that the revolt is primarily led by victims. But the relationship between radicals and victims is more imaginary than real.

Those who perpetrate attacks in Europe are not inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, Libya or Afghanistan. They are not necessarily the poorest, the most humiliated or the least integrated. The fact that 25% of jihadis are converts shows that the link between radicals and their “people” is also a largely imaginary construct.

Revolutionaries almost never come from the suffering classes. In their identification with the proletariat, the “masses” and the colonised, there is a choice based on something other than their objective situation. Very few terrorists or jihadis advertise their own life stories. They generally talk about what they have seen of others’ suffering. It was not Palestinians who shot up the Bataclan.

Up until the mid-1990s, most international jihadis came from the Middle East and had fought in Afghanistan prior to the fall of the communist regime there in 1992. Afterwards, they returned to their home countries to take part in jihad, or took the cause abroad. These were the people who mounted the first wave of “globalised” attacks (the first attempt on the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, against the US embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the US Navy destroyer Cole in 2000).

This first generation of jihadis was mentored by the likes of Bin Laden, Ramzi Yousef and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. But from 1995 onwards, a new breed began to develop – known in the west as the “homegrown terrorist”.

Who are these new radicals? We know many of their names thanks to police identification of perpetrators of attacks in Europe and the US. More still have been caught plotting attacks. We also have all the biographical information that has been gathered by journalists. There is no need to embark on painstaking fieldwork to figure out terrorist trajectories. All the data and profiles are available.

When it comes to understanding their motivations, we have traces of their speech: tweets, Google chats, Skype conversations, messages on WhatsApp and Facebook. They call their friends and family. They issue statements before they die and leave testaments on video. In short, even if we cannot be sure that we understand them, we are familiar with them.

We certainly have more information on the lives of terrorists operating in Europe than we do on jihadis who leave for foreign countries and never return. But, as a Sciences Po study on French jihadis who died in Syria has shown, there are many similarities between these groups. Here I will focus primarily on Franco-Belgians, who supply most of the ranks of western jihadis. But Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and the Netherlands also have significant contingents on the frontlines.

Using this information, I have compiled a database of roughly 100 people who have been involved in terrorism in France, or have left France or Belgium to take part in global jihad in the past 20 years. It includes the perpetrators of all the major attacks targeting French or Belgian territory.

There is no standard terrorist profile, but there are recurrent characteristics. The first conclusion that can be drawn is that the profiles have hardly changed over the past 20 years. Khaled Kelkal, France’s first homegrown terrorist, and the Kouachi brothers (Charlie Hebdo, Paris, 2015) share a number of common features: second generation; fairly well integrated at first; period of petty crime; radicalisation in prison; attack and death – weapons in hand – in a standoff with the police.

Another characteristic that all western countries have in common is that radicals are almost all “born-again” Muslims who, after living a highly secular life – frequenting clubs, drinking alcohol, involvement in petty crime – suddenly renew their religious observance, either individually or in the context of a small group. The Abdeslam brothers ran a Brussels bar and went out to nightclubs in the months preceding the Bataclan shooting. Most move into action in the months following their religious “reconversion” or “conversion”, but have usually already exhibited signs of radicalisation.

In almost every case, the processes by which a radical group is formed are nearly identical. The group’s membership is always the same: brothers, childhood friends, acquaintances from prison, sometimes from a training camp. The number of sets of siblings found is also remarkable.

This over-representation of siblings does not occur in any other context of radicalisation, whether on the extreme left or Islamist groups. It highlights the significance of the generational dimension of radicalisation.

As the former jihadi David Vallat has written, the radical preachers’ rhetoric could basically be summarised as: “Your father’s Islam is what the colonisers left behind, the Islam of those who bow down and obey. Our Islam is the Islam of combatants, of blood, of resistance.”

Radicals are in fact often orphans – as the Kouachi brothers were – or come from dysfunctional families. They are not necessarily rebelling against their parents personally, but against what they represent: humiliation, concessions made to society, and what they view as their religious ignorance.

Most of the new radicals are deeply immersed in youth culture: they go to nightclubs, pick up girls, smoke and drink. Nearly 50% of the jihadis in France, according to my database, have a history of petty crime – mainly drug dealing, but also acts of violence and, less frequently, armed robbery. A similar figure is found in Germany and the United States – including a surprising number of arrests for drunk driving. Their dress habits also conform to those of today’s youth: brands, baseball caps, hoods, in other words streetwear, and not even of the Islamic variety.

Their musical tastes are also those of the times: they like rap music and go out to clubs. One of the best-known radicalised figures is a German rapper, Denis Cuspert – first known as Deso Dogg, then as Abu Talha al-Almani – who went to fight in Syria. Naturally, they are also gaming enthusiasts and are fond of violent American movies.

Their violent tendencies can have outlets other than jihad and terrorism – as we see in the gang wars of Marseille. They can also be channelled, either by institutions – Mohammed Merah wanted to enlist in the army – or by sport. One group of Portuguese converts, most of whom were originally Angolan, left London to join Isis after bonding at a Thai boxing club started by a British NGO. Combat sport clubs are more important than mosques in jihadi social life.

The language spoken by radicals is always that of their country of residence. In France, they often switch to a Salafised version of French banlieue speech when they reconvert.

Prison time puts them in contact with radicalised “peers” and far outside of any institutionalised religion. Prison amplifies many of the factors that fuel contemporary radicalisation: the generational dimension; revolt against the system; the diffusion of a simplified Salafism; the formation of a tight-knit group; the search for dignity related to respect for the norm; and the reinterpretation of crime as legitimate political protest.

Another common feature is the radicals’ distance from their immediate circle. They did not live in a particularly religious environment. Their relationship to the local mosque was ambivalent: either they attended episodically, or they were expelled for having shown disrespect for the local imam. None of them belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood, none of them had worked with a Muslim charity, none of them had taken part in proselytising activities, none of them were members of a Palestinian solidarity movement, and lastly, none of them, to my knowledge, took part in the rioting in French suburbs in 2005. They were not first radicalised by a religious movement before turning to terrorism.

If indeed there was religious radicalisation, it did not occur in the framework of Salafi mosques, but individually or within the group. The only exceptions are in Britain, which has a network of militant mosques frequented by members of al-Muhajiroun, which gave rise to an even more radical group, Sharia4UK, led by Anjem Choudary. The question is therefore when and where jihadis embrace religion. Religious fervour arises outside community structures, belatedly, fairly suddenly, and not long before terrorists move into action.

To summarise: the typical radical is a young, second-generation immigrant or convert, very often involved in episodes of petty crime, with practically no religious education, but having a rapid and recent trajectory of conversion/reconversion, more often in the framework of a group of friends or over the internet than in the context of a mosque. The embrace of religion is rarely kept secret, but rather is exhibited, but it does not necessarily correspond to immersion in religious practice. The rhetoric of rupture is violent – the enemy is kafir, one with whom no compromise is possible – but also includes their own family, the members of which are accused of observing Islam improperly, or refusing to convert.

At the same time, it is obvious that the radicals’ decision to identify with jihad and to claim affiliation with a radical Islamic group is not merely an opportunistic choice: the reference to Islam makes all the difference between jihad and the other forms of violence that young people indulge in. Pointing out this pervasive culture of violence does not amount to “exonerating” Islam. The fact that these young people choose Islam as a framework for thought and action is fundamental, and it is precisely the Islamisation of radicalism that we must strive to understand.

Aside from the common characteristics discussed above, there is no typical social and economic profile of the radicalised. There is a popular and very simplistic explanation that views terrorism as the consequence of unsuccessful integration – and thus the harbinger of a civil war to come – without for a moment taking into account the masses of well-integrated and socially ascendant Muslims. It is, for instance, an unassailable fact that in France far more Muslims are enrolled in the police and security forces than are involved in jihad.

Furthermore, radicals do not come from hardline communities. The Abdeslam brothers’ Brussels bar sat in a neighbourhood that has been described as “Salafised” – which would therefore be off-limits to people who drink liquor and women not wearing the hijab. But this example shows that the reality of these neighbourhoods is more complex than we are led to believe.

It is very common to view jihadism as an extension of Salafism. Not all Salafis are jihadis, but all jihadis are supposedly Salafis, and so Salafism is the gateway to jihadism. In a word, religious radicalisation is considered to be the first stage of political radicalisation. But things are more complicated than that, as we have seen.

Clearly, however, these young radicals are sincere believers: they truly believe that they will go to heaven, and their frame of reference is deeply Islamic. They join organisations that want to set up an Islamic system, or even, in the case of Isis, to restore the caliphate. But what form of Islam are we talking about?

As we have seen, jihadis do not descend into violence after poring over sacred texts. They do not have the necessary religious culture – and, above all, care little about having one. They do not become radicals because they have misread the texts or because they have been manipulated. They are radicals because they choose to be, because only radicalism appeals to them. No matter what database is taken as a reference, the paucity of religious knowledge among jihadis is glaring. According to leaked Isis records containing details for more than 4,000 foreign recruits, while most of the fighters are well-educated, 70% state that they have only basic knowledge of Islam.

It is important to distinguish here between the version of Islam espoused by Isis itself, which is much more grounded in the methodological tradition of exegesis of the prophet Muhammad’s words, and ostensibly based on the work of “scholars” – and the Islam of the jihadis who claim allegiance to Isis, which first of all revolves around a vision of heroism and modern-day violence.

The scriptural exegeses that fill the pages of Dabiq and Dar al-Islam, the two recent Isis magazines written in English and French, are not the cause of radicalisation. They help to provide a theological rationalisation for the violence of the radicals – based not on real knowledge, but an appeal to authority. When young jihadis speak of “truth”, it is never in reference to discursive knowledge. They are referring to their own certainty, sometimes supported by an incantatory reference to the sheikhs, whom they have never read. For example Cédric, a converted Frenchman, claimed at his own trial: “I’m not a keyboard jihadi, I didn’t convert on YouTube. I read the scholars, the real ones.” He said this even though he cannot read Arabic and met the members of his network over the internet.

It probably makes sense to start by listening to what the terrorists say. The same themes recur with all of them, summed up in the posthumous statement made by Mohammad Siddique Khan, leader of the group that carried out the London bombings on 7 July 2005.

The first motivation he cited is atrocities committed by western countries against the “Muslim people” (in the transcript he says, “my people all over the world”); the second is the role of avenging hero (“I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters,” “Now you too will taste the reality of this situation”); the third is death (“We love death as much as you love life”), and his reception in heaven (“May Allah ... raise me amongst those whom I love like the prophets, the messengers, the martyrs”).

The Muslim community such terrorists are eager to avenge is almost never specified. It is a non-historical and non-spatial reality. When they rail against western policy in the Middle East, jihadis use the term “crusaders”; they do not refer to the French colonisation of Algeria.

Radicals never refer explicitly to the colonial period. They reject or disregard all political and religious movements that have come before them. They do not align themselves with the struggles of their fathers; almost none of them go back to their parents’ countries of origin to wage jihad. It is noteworthy that none of the jihadis, whether born Muslim or converted, has to my knowledge campaigned as part of a pro-Palestinian movement or belonged to any sort of association to combat Islamophobia, or even an Islamic NGO. These radicalised youths read texts in French or English circulating over the internet, but not works in Arabic.

Oddly enough, the defenders of the Islamic State never talk about sharia and almost never about the Islamic society that will be built under the auspices of Isis. Those who say that they went to Syria because they wanted “to live in a true Islamic society” are typically returnees who deny having participated in violence while there – as if wanting to wage jihad and wanting to live according to Islamic law were incompatible. And they are, in a way, because living in an Islamic society does not interest jihadis: they do not go to the Middle East to live, but to die. That is the paradox: these young radicals are not utopians, they are nihilists.

What is more radical about the new radicals than earlier generations of revolutionaries, Islamists and Salafis is their hatred of existing societies, whether western or Muslim. This hatred is embodied in the pursuit of their own death when committing mass murder. They kill themselves along with the world they reject. Since 11 September 2001, this is the radicals’ preferred modus operandi.

The suicidal mass killer is unfortunately a common contemporary figure. The typical example is the American school shooter, who goes to his school heavily armed, indiscriminately kills as many people as possible, then kills himself or lets himself be killed by the police. He has already posted photographs, videos and statements online. In them he assumed heroic poses and delighted in the fact that everyone would now know who he was. In the United States there were 50 attacks or attempted attacks of this sort between 1999 and 2016.

The boundaries between a suicidal mass killer of this sort and a militant for the caliphate are understandably hazy. The Nice killer, for instance, was first described as mentally ill and later as an Isis militant whose crime had been premeditated. But these ideas are not mutually exclusive.

The point here is not to mix all these categories together. Each one is specific, but there is a striking common thread that runs through the mass murders perpetrated by disaffected, nihilistic and suicidal youths. What organisations like al-Qaida and Isis provide is a script.

The strength of Isis is to play on our fears. And the principal fear is the fear of Islam. The only strategic impact of the attacks is their psychological effect. They do not affect the west’s military capabilities; they even strengthen them, by putting an end to military budget cuts. They have a marginal economic effect, and only jeopardise our democratic institutions to the extent that we ourselves call them into question through the everlasting debate on the conflict between security and the rule of law. The fear is that our own societies will implode and there will be a civil war between Muslims and the “others”.

We ask ourselves what Islam wants, what Islam is, without for a moment realising that this world of Islam does not exist; that the ummah is at best a pious wish and at worst an illusion; that the conflicts are first and foremost among Muslims themselves; that the key to these conflicts is first of all political; that national issues remain the key to the Middle East and social issues the key to integration.

Certainly Isis, like al-Qaida, has fashioned a grandiose imaginary system in which it pictures itself as conquering and defeating the west. It is a huge fantasy, like all millenarian ideologies. But, unlike the major secular ideologies of the 20th century, jihadism has a very narrow social and political base. As we have seen, it does not mobilise the masses, and only draws in those on the fringe.

There is a temptation to see in Islam a radical ideology that mobilises throngs of people in the Muslim world, just as Nazism was able to mobilise large sections of the German population. But the reality is that Isis’s pretension to establish a global caliphate is a delusion – that is why it draws in violent youngsters who have delusions of grandeur.

What comes to mind when you think of the French Foreign Legion? Most likely men struggling through the desert in heavy blue coats and white peaked caps. Men who joined up after a lifetime of crime, fighting valiantly, then leaving the Legion to become tough, faceless mercenaries trading on their background, or else dying in the mud of Dien Bien Phu as the last choppers leave for La Belle France.

The reality is different. In its first version, the Legion was seen as a rough mercenary force that guaranteed immunity from criminal prosecution, as well as a new life and French citizenship. In its second incarnation, the Legion became a sort of substitute family. Now in its third, the official image of the Legion is of an elite fighting force, to be compared with the British SAS or the US Navy Seals. Today, legionnaires are much more than a band of mere ‘expendables’.

The modern Legion still has a few things in common with its previous incarnations. There remains an emphasis on marching (to enter, you have to complete several hikes in full kit, ranging from 50 to 120km) and the men who join are still keen to fight. The wages, though, are now quite good, especially if you see duty in a combat zone. Even the most basic pay of a recruit is €1,205 a month, which, considering there are no bills or food costs, is nothing like the five centimes a day it was in the 19th century. Then, a legionnaire could afford wine or tobacco, not both, and certainly no other luxuries.

Young men still queue to join up in great numbers. Several thousand apply per year, and some 80 per cent are rejected – the Legion doesn’t accept anyone wanted by the police or with a serious criminal record, though misdemeanours and petty crimes are still acceptable. The modern Legion is around 8,000-strong and needs only 1,000 new recruits each year to replenish the ranks. The average recruitment age is 23. In recent times, 42 per cent of recruits come from eastern and central Europe, 14 per cent from western Europe and the US, and around 10 per cent from France. Around 10 per cent come from Latin America and 10 per cent from Asia. These young, rootless men swear their allegiance not to France, but to the Legion itself. It is their only loyalty.

The Legion is composed of several branches: engineers, paras, armoured cavalry, infantry, and pioneers. The paras are based in Calvi on the island of Corsica (they are still not trusted to be on mainland France after a coup attempt in 1961). Other arms have been garrisoned in French Guiana and the United Arab Emirates. The Legion saw service most recently in Mali, where they helped restore the government against insurgent Al-Qaeda forces.

Recruits must present themselves at one of several centres in France. If this pre-selection goes well, it’s on to Aubagne, a small town about 20km inland from Marseilles on the Mediterranean. There follows one to two weeks of selection where numerous mental and physical tests are taken. The minimum age is 17.5, the maximum 39.5. There are no educational requirements.

Once they make it through selection, recruits sign a five-year contract and are then shipped to ‘the farm’ in the Pyrenees for six weeks of hellish training which further weeds out the unsuitable. Though probably not as tough as SAS selection in the UK, it certainly involves more cleaning, marching, singing and discipline – much more. It is accepted that hard discipline is the only way to weld men from such disparate origins into a single fighting unit. The Legion allows officers to strike the men in a routine manner. The method is age-old and simple: break the man, remove his old allegiances, then give him a new family.

In this new family, recruits are also allowed to choose a new name – the name by which they will be known ever after. And so, by the end, they have become someone new, with a new country and a new identity. Indeed, this is the most obvious pull the Legion has for men: a new life. This life, however, is wrapped up in a world that honours death.

The initial five years can be renewed at the end of service. In either case, legionnaires have the option to take French citizenship after three years – an attraction for those who would pay dearly for a European passport. A longstanding tradition of the Legion is that any legionnaire wounded in action automatically gets his citizenship, whether or not he completes his service, becoming ‘Français par le sang versé’ (French through spilt blood).

The reasons modern recruits give for joining can seem prosaic. Gareth Carins, a former quantity surveyor, turned down the British Army in favour of the Legion. ‘The truth was, I liked the army,’ he writes in Diary of a Legionnaire (2007). ‘I liked hill-walking, I liked travelling, and I was looking for an adventure.’ He reports that people regard his justification with ‘a look of disbelief and even disappointment’ – and rightly so, since the mystique of the Legion can’t be so easily captured. The one thing Carins doesn’t mention is death, but death is close to the heart of the Legion’s attraction.

In this, it differs from the standing armies of other modern countries. Joining the British or US army involves swords and salutes on the parade ground, but the Legion’s inaugural ceremony in Aubagne leaves no doubt that this organisation cleverly manipulates the death wish of many. At the Legion’s tomblike headquarters there is a shrine: a wooden prosthetic hand that once belonged to Legion Captain Jean Danjou, who died in Mexico in 1863 defending a road for a long-forgotten cause. Around the roped off hand-shrine hang placards inscribed minutely with the names of the dead – all 40,000 of them, dating back to the Legion’s inception in 1831. The message is clear. Sacrifice is essential but you will not be forgotten.

Death-loving nihilism is not the sole motivation, of course. Camaraderie, adventure, danger, the desire to prove oneself all play their part too, as with any army. And, perhaps more than most regular armies, love affairs gone wrong propel many into the arms of the Legion. When the British author Douglas Boyd interviewed a jungle warfare instructor in Guiana about his reason for joining the Legion, he was told: ‘Histoire de nana, le plus souvent.’ (‘Girlfriend trouble, mainly.’) Romantic by nature, they seek a romantic solution by sacrificing themselves to the masculine fantasy of the Legion.

The cap legionnaires wear, called the kepi, is bleached as white as the bones of a Saharan camel. It stands for Algeria, the Legion’s first home. With the French invasion of Algeria in 1830, there was a need for a force to pacify the country. There had been mercenary forces in the French Army before, but they had been organised along a national basis. One exception was the Hohenlohe regiment, largely staffed by Germans but including men of all nationalities. This force, raised in 1815 after the defeat of Napoleon when France was in disarray, was disbanded in 1831, its foreign troops incorporated into the newly formed French Foreign Legion that same year. So a certain amount of German DNA entered the Legion, and there remains a sneaking regard for German military prowess. Indeed, after both the First and the Second world wars, Germans formed the majority of the Legion’s strength.

The slow and brutal colonisation of Algeria during the 19th century earned the Legion its reputation for toughness and expertise in the desert. It was here that the routine use of daily 40km marches made the Legion the fastest-moving infantry strike force then in existence. The Legion were military innovators and had the quickest system of infantry movement prior to motorised transport. Two men would share a mule that carried their kit. One would walk fast at its side while the other rode. After a few kilometres, they would change places. With this system, the legionnaires could travel 70 or 80 km a day with full kit, just as fast as Bedouin raiders with their camels.

When France moved into Tunisia in 1881, and into Morocco in 1911, the Legion followed with its desert experience. The Saharan period is formative for the Legion. The romance of the desert was cross-fertilised with that of the runaway convict-turned-mercenary, creating an occidental counterpart to fellow desert nomads, the Tuareg. It is this romance that attracted not just former criminals but many well-born men to their ranks, including King Peter I of Serbia, Prince Aage of Denmark, Crown Prince Bao of Vietnam, Louis Prince Napoléon VI and Louis II Prince of Monaco. Writers and artists who have been drawn to the Legion’s ranks include the novelist Arthur Koestler, the First World War poet Alan Seeger, the composer Cole Porter and the film director William Wellman.

But the romance of the desert was not what Erwin Carlé discovered when he enlisted in 1905. Born in 1876 in Germany, Carlé had worked in the US as a cowboy and a journalist before joining up. His memoir In the Foreign Legion (1910), published under the pseudonym Erwin Rosen, portrays the traditional Legion in its toughest era, and was one source for the classic novel Beau Geste (1924) by P C Wren. For Rosen, however, the Legion ceased to be interesting and fun once he ran out of money for ‘extras’ such as wine and good food.

Rosen describes how a new recruit’s bed would be placed between two older recruits who’d teach him the ropes. If he bought them a few bottles of wine, he learned even faster. All his kit had to be folded into a ‘pacquet’ ready to be packed in a rucksack. There were no wardrobes for the legionnaire, and no privacy since he lived in a dormitory with 20 other men. Yet Rosen reports that there was barely a raised voice and no curses when the recruits were taught how to handle their weapons. Likewise, when marching, no legionnaire was told off for being sloppy or wearing his kit strangely, as long as he marched 40 km in eight hours, with five minutes’ rest every hour. While the recruits eased off their 50-kg packs to rest, the old-timers simply lay flat with their packs underneath. It saved time not undoing the straps, time that could be spent resting.

The Legion Rosen describes is one of endless toil. When not marching or training, they were required to clean and do ‘corvée’ duty: basically any dirty job required by the colonial administration in Algeria. At one time, Rosen had to clean the sewers of the local prison, and was rewarded with the jeers of the Arab population: only a legionnaire was considered low enough for this filthy job. Rosen also notes that most of the roads in North Africa were built by the Legion, a handy hard-working force that was then among the cheapest in the world.

Why did they put up with this? Many didn’t and talk of deserting was common, but without money it was difficult to escape. It became rather easier to desert after 1962, when the Legion shifted its headquarters from Sidi Bel Abbès in Algeria to Aubagne; Carins tells of a modern-day American who left during training and headed over the Pyrenees into Spain. If caught, he would have been sentenced to military prison, but he made it home. The kind of official manhunt that would have been sanctioned by desertion 100 years ago is far more lacklustre today. The fact is, the modern Legion has enough keen recruits not to care too much if some run away.

In the past, strong discipline merged into punishment. If a man fainted on a march, he’d be tied to a pole sticking out of the side of a wagon. His arms would be supported, but if his legs couldn’t perform a walking action, he would be dragged along, burning a hole in his boots and feet. This harsh treatment was not seen as unjust since any man who couldn’t keep up would be killed by the Arab forces that often tailed the expedition.

After the Mexican civil war of 1857-60, and as an interlude from pacifying the North African colonies, the Legion was sent to help install Maximilian, the brother of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph, in Mexico. There were other troops also on loan to the insurgent regime including British Royal Marines, Austrian footsoldiers and even 447 Egyptians. But it was the French who stayed longest, until 1867, and did most of the fighting. Oddly enough, one of the few remaining influences of the Legion’s time in Mexico is the widespread acceptance of the French word for marriage to describe wedding musicians: the mariachi band.

The story of the Battle of Camarón on 30 April 1863, when Captain Danjou lost his life, has become the stuff of legionnaire legend. Surrounded by 3,000 Mexicans, Danjou and 64 of his men were given the chance to surrender. Danjou, however, knew that if he held up the Mexicans, a vital convoy of supplies would have time to get through to his men. So there would be no surrender. Down to their last cartridge, the final six legionnaires standing made a bayonet charge. Somehow, three of the six survived (with hideous wounds) and were protected by a merciful Mexican officer impressed by their bravery. Even then these three gave in only when their terms were met: that they kept their empty rifles and could give an honour guard to escort the remains of Captain Danjou. But not all his remains. In a macabre, comic twist, his wooden hand was somehow overlooked. After prolonged negotiation, it was later bought back by the Legion from a Mexican farmer who had found it but was reluctant to part with it. This is the wooden hand enshrined in Aubagne, where each new legionnaire is inducted, and where they say a final goodbye upon completing their service. The day of Danjou’s death is still celebrated every 30 April as Camarón Day.

The First World War, in which one in three French men of military age died, saw the Legion employed on many fronts fighting the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. Germans who were in the Legion were kept in Algeria for fear they might desert. The rest fought. The Legion, along with the Moroccan Division, were the most decorated French unit in the 1914-18 conflict. They fought on every front, including Gallipoli, but, when the war ended, their numbers were so depleted there was talk they ought to be disbanded despite their gallantry.

This was a crucial moment: the Legion needed to reinvent itself or die (echoing its mantra ‘march or die’), and a certain Colonel Paul-Frédéric Rollet came to their rescue. Short, slight, well-bearded, and with a penchant for wearing rope-soled espadrilles not boots while marching, Rollet understood that, instead of offering a sanctuary for runaway convicts, legionnaires needed a new myth of belonging and self-sacrifice. The Legion has won many battles since its formation but is known, really, for its marvellous defeats: at Camarón in 1863 and at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954 (where another one-armed officer, Colonel Charles Piroth, showed extreme bravery before killing himself with a grenade).

Rollet was a military genius who understood the inner symbolism of such things as heroic defeats, odd uniforms and lost limbs: Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, one of Britain’s most decorated officers; José Millán-Astray, founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion; and Admiral Horatio Nelson himself were all missing hands or arms.  Suggestively, Paul Rollet went into battle with just a rolled umbrella. He believed that a commander showed lack of faith in his men if he needed to be armed, and besides, it distracted from his real task of inspiring his soldiers to fight. That Rollet seized on the heroic defeat at Camarón is no accident: men brought up to accept death and mutilation as the price for never being forgotten by their uber-family (the Legion) are stronger than those bribed with the comforting notions of victory and glory. Rollet knew that an army doesn’t march on its feet, or even its stomach. It marches on the stories it tells itself. So he made sure that the Legion was full of traditions and stories and rituals. He also turned a few marching songs into full-blown anthems. However tough, legionnaires must learn to sing with gusto the songs of former warriors. Other armies don’t really do this, nor do the officers bring the men breakfast once a year (on Camarón Day, of course). This action alone mimics a family in its concern. Every Legion memoir (and they are legion), however much it complains of bullying or incompetence, mentions with heartfelt gratitude the songs and traditions imbibed alongside the forced marches.

Having fought through the First World War, Rollet had seen the mechanised future of warfare, and realised that men respond badly when treated like machines. He’d watched the French Army mutiny in 1917 and had even used his legionnaires to put down such an insurrection. This was a French Army that had been treated as cannon fodder for the great machine of death that was the Western Front. Rollet would go the other way. On the Legion’s 100th anniversary in 1931, and the first Camarón Day, he ordered that the infantry be led by bearded pioneers carrying immense axes. It was a quirky refusal to put guns on show but he knew that discipline and morale were more important than mere firepower. Not that they didn’t have that, too. Rollet expanded the Legion into infantry, cavalry and engineers. Too many French boys had died in the First World War, so from now on foreigners would defend France’s colonies. He had them posted in Fez and Marrakech in Morocco, in Sidi Bel Abbès in Algeria, as well as in Tunisia, Syria and Indochina. Between the wars, the Legion was at its greatest numbers, counting some 33,000 men.

Astutely, Rollet maintained the early German connection by making official the slow, 88-steps-a-minute march of the old Hohenlohe regiment. He maintained the desert connection with the official headwear, the white kepi, with its back flap as protection against the sun. But perhaps Rollet’s greatest legacy was to put in place the elements necessary for the Legion to later transform from yet another mercenary colonial force to an elite fighting unit.

But in Rollet’s day, that elite quality was still a few years away. The interwar, uber-family Legion is perhaps best known for the games they created. Russians who joined taught bored fellow legionnaires to play Cuckoo. Two men with loaded revolvers enter a cellar or darkened room. One calls ‘Cuckoo!’, then dives for cover. The other shoots. Then he calls cuckoo and the other fires. The game ends with either death, severe injury, or both revolvers empty. Another lark was Buffalo, in which each participant drinks a bottle of vermouth and then charges head-down at his opponent with hands tied behind his back, with things settled literally by cracking heads. If both are still standing afterwards, another bottle is drunk, and another head-on collision arranged. Usually two bottles, occasionally three, were consumed per man before a cracked skull or severe concussion decided the duel.

In the Second World War, the Legion fought against the invading Germans. After France fell, the Legion split: some remained loyal to Vichy, others sided with Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill. These two sides of the Legion actually faced each other briefly in Syria, before the Vichy forces capitulated and joined the Free French.

One legionnaire who served in Syria and later North Africa was Susan Travers, the only woman ever to be officially recognised as a full Legion member. The bilingual daughter of a British Navy officer who grew up in France, Travers was 32 when she unofficially joined. First a nurse and then an ambulance driver, she became the mistress of several Legion officers, ending up with the commander General Marie-Pierre Koenig. Travers demonstrated real courage under fire on numerous occasions. She was the only woman allowed in the defensive ‘box’ perimeter at Bir Hakeim, a battle that ended with the Legion making a heroic stand, and breaking out under cover of darkness to escape capture. It was Travers who drove the two commanding officers – both of whom had been her lovers – and the car suffered only 11 bullet holes and ruined shock absorbers. They let her drive not because it was her job, but because she was the coolest behind the wheel.

After the Second World War, many of the Legion’s former enemies, especially German soldiers, joined up. That some had served in the SS is a rumour many legionnaires like to promote but one that’s hard to believe. Members of the SS had their blood group tattooed on their arm, and even those with the tattoo removed would have found post-war recruiters far from sympathetic. But there were plenty of ex-Wehrmacht soldiers to swell the forces of the Legion in its next two conflicts: Indochina and Algeria.

Indochina between 1946-54 should not be mentioned lightly when the Legion is concerned. Often called the Michelin war (after the giant tyre company that stood to lose its immense rubber plantations if the Communists won), the Legion did its mercenary best, despite being given a hopeless task and incompetent leadership under General Henri Navarre, the architect of the Dien Bien Phu fiasco.

At Dien Bien Phu, where the Camarón story was read out before the final assaults by the overwhelmingly superior numbers of Vietnamese, the Legion showed that they could still die – but for what? France was already committed to pulling out of Vietnam, and was simply using military action to gain better terms. In the late 1950s and early ’60s in Algeria, the protracted and bloody civil war mimicked the previous bloody conflicts with Arabs. This time it was decolonisation on the cards.

France was split about Algeria, though the majority favoured pulling out. Four former generals of the French Army thought otherwise, and staged a coup against De Gaulle in 1961. The elite 1st parachute regiment of the Legion were sent to capture Paris. De Gaulle went on radio and television appealing to the nation to side with him against the revolt – and succeeded. The 1st paras were disbanded, though, strangely enough, not really in disgrace since a legionnaire swears allegiance to the Legion and not to France. In following their superior’s orders to effectively mutiny against the government, they were not acting dishonourably but according to their code. And when the troops made their final march before disbanding, they sang the Édith Piaf classic ‘Non, Je, ne regrette rien.’

The coup attempt brought to the surface the troubled relationship between France and its Foreign Legion. The French admire it and yet don’t quite trust it. Another reinvention was required. This time, the solution was truly bold: to turn the Legion into an elite force, a strike force, the kind that could easily put down a coup, or stage one in another country. The undisgraced 2nd Para became the ‘Young Lions’ of this newly created force.

Elite fighting forces are a serious attraction to young men. And the Legion, unlike many special forces, gets to fight a lot. Death and elitism are a heady cocktail. Since the late 1960s, the Legion has fought with distinction in Chad in 1969-71, in Zaire in 1978, and been a peacekeeping force in Lebanon in the early 1980s. During the First Gulf War in 1990-91, they served to protect one arm of the coalition forces and received very light casualties. In 1992, they were back in old Indochina in Cambodia, and also in Somalia. In 1993, they were in Bosnia, and Rwanda in 1994. In this century, they have served again in the Ivory Coast in 2003, and Chad in 2008. In 2013-14, they helped to rid Mali of the politicised Islamic extremists that took control of Timbuktu – a return to their romantic desert roots.

Ex-legionnaires are rather touchy on the subject of their motivation. They naturally distrust anyone who hasn’t had their experiences. To outsiders, it looks a little strange. All that discipline and marching – and then ending up dead. That they are men who love fighting is only half the story. Even the desire to prove oneself as manly and tough cannot account for the continued fascination for this army of foreign mercenaries who celebrate not victory but an honourable death. One has to go further, and look at the Samurai tradition of Japan, where an almost erotic interest in death runs alongside a more workaday nihilism. According to the 18th-century Samurai manual the Hagakure: ‘A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this you will awaken from your dreams.’